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Curling is the darling sport of the Winter Olympics.
Each four years followers turn into transfixed by athletes that appear like us sliding and curling 40-pound rocks down a 50-yard ice track with usually laser-like precision.
Those stones spend a lot of time banging into each other and yet they hardly ever break. It seems that is because of where they arrive from, the tiny and unique Scottish island of Ailsa Craig, better often called the gorgeous backdrop island for the Ailsa Course at Turnberry, the Scottish golf course owned by President Donald Trump. Turnberry has hosted the Open Championship four occasions, most just lately in 2009.
Maddie Meyer/Getty Images According to the BBC, the granite utilized in all curling stones comes from one of two locations, the island of Ailsa Craig or a quarry in Wales. For the Olympics, all stones are made from the Ailsa Craig granite.
The delivery of the 220-acre island island was a bit of a perfect storm that led to something extraordinarily rare — granite smooth enough to be predictable on ice and strong enough to withstand banging into other large and heavy stones.
Michael Easter of Scientific American described what makes the stone so special:
The stones' efficiency traces back to the island's formation about 60 million years ago. Ailsa Craig is a volcanic intrusion—a mass of magma that compelled its way up between current formations—explains John Faithfull, a geologist on the College of Glasgow. The magma then cooled comparatively shortly to form granite, and the encompassing rock eroded away, "leaving just the very resistant exhausting mass of Ailsa Craig poking up out of the water," Faithfull says.
As the volcanic rock crystallized, it developed a powerful, uniform surface. "When magma cools rapidly, it creates very small crystals. These ones interlocked, and chemical bonds developed between them," says Martin Gillespie, a geologist on the British Geological Survey. "It also would not seem to have any microcracks," he says of the granite.
Cheap Stone Island led to the formation of three types of granite on the island, two of which are used to make curling stones. stone island hoodie makes up the layer of the stone that glides on ice and customary green granite is used for the middle layer that strikes different stones.